


could not run away it seemed

by cygnes



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King, Legion (TV)
Genre: Background Relationships, Gen, M/M, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-01
Updated: 2018-10-01
Packaged: 2019-07-21 02:28:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16150622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cygnes/pseuds/cygnes
Summary: The man in black takes an interest in David Haller, but it keeps going poorly for one or both of them, no matter how many different ways he tries it.





	could not run away it seemed

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to [skazka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skazka/pseuds/skazka) for encouraging me in this wild venture in the first place, and for looking over the first draft and providing helpful feedback.
> 
> Content warnings in endnote.

David comes to the attention of the man in black when one version of the world twists out of existence. He feels it as a spider feels a human walking through its web: first a tugging, a sense of accomplishment, and then confusion and terror. Terror slides off of him quickly, though, like water off a duck’s back—always has. (Or maybe not _always_ , back in the mortal lifetime of Walter Padick, but most of the time since then.)

He watches the death throes. It’s a messy affair: not a quick winking out or a slow fading away to void and silence. This is more like the world being flayed, turned inside out, screaming itself raw until the beams shake. This is something being broken before it is allowed to die. This is slow torture for every living thing. He can’t help but be impressed. 

The big guy—not Gan, or God, but the closest kind of power he can be sure exists—is not best pleased. There is a wailing and gnashing of teeth. So it’s good old R.F., faithful servant of a bad old King, who has to do the leg-work. Find the world-breaker and make sure it doesn’t break anything too important. He accepts the assignment with pleasure. Anything that can take down a whole version of reality is worth knowing more about. And if he can keep it in his back pocket, a little extra insurance if he decides he wants to be his own boss for a change, so much the better. 

The world-breaker is all that’s left by the time he gets there: a tiny guttering candle-flame of consciousness in todash space. It used to be a man named David Haller. Lucky for both of them, there are a lot of versions of David Haller to work with. Not as many as there are of Roland’s most successful ka-tet—don’t tell the poor dears, but Jakes and Susannahs and Eddies are dime-a-dozen. Roland’s fault, really, for going through so many versions. The wheel of the universe turns and turns and keeps providing what is needful for the gunslinger on his quest.

It’s not as though Roland’s is the only ongoing quest. No, far from it. Their wheel is part of a bigger machinery, full of interlocking parts. David must be part of someone else’s. Or, well. He _was_. Now he’s whatever R.F., the man of a hundred faces and a thousand names but usually the man in black, decides to make of him. 

He falls back on an old trick first. It hadn’t gone well the first time, but with a new variable introduced, who can say? He’d found someone with a talent—not a world-breaker, but a bit of a world-shaker, like he himself had been in his tenderest youth—and twisted her up, left her out in the desert like a trap for Roland to spring. Suffice to say that it hadn’t worked out well for him in the end, and Roland hadn’t suffered unduly. But with David, maybe… 

The basic pattern is the same: troubled youth with a little something more than what’s called the touch or the shine. Troubled youth looking for direction that he, as a kindly soul by the name of Richard Fannin, is willing and able to give. The girl had shied from him because she’d been trained to fear men in general and because her animal instinct or common sense told her that he was a bad man in particular. David warms to Richard quickly. He’s had more love in his life than the girl had, but he’s just as hungry for validation, and he’s got nothing going for him in the way of common sense. 

“I’m crazy,” David confides. “Bona fide, diagnosed, out of my goddamn gourd. Maybe I made you up.” He looks at Richard from under his lashes, innocently coy in the way that comes easily to teenagers whether they’re innocent or not.

“Hell of an imagination you’ve got, then,” Richard says. 

The biggest problem is that David’s got a flea in his ear. A tapeworm in his head. Some younger, lesser King who wants all that power and maybe that sweet young flesh for himself (and really, Richard’s not in a position to judge). He’ll have to have himself a little palaver with the self-proclaimed Shadow King, one of these days, but he’ll cross that bridge when he comes to it. For now, they can share. 

David is relieved when his sister objects to the fact that he’s hanging out with an older man because it’s outside confirmation that Richard exists. David loves Amy. He loves Amy the way a brother should love his sister, but at a higher volume. She’s the only one who’s ever stuck by him. And now she’s off at college, leaving him in the hands of parents who can barely handle him on a good day. She starts coming back for the weekends to see David after they fight about David’s new friend. Richard, finally left alone in her company, turns on the charm. He’s got a bridge in New York to sell her.

“You’re letting David be an anchor around your neck,” he says. They’re sitting out on the porch. Amy’s hands are tangled together between her knees. Her shoulders are high and tight. “Why can’t he just be your brother?”

“Why can’t you mind your own business?” Amy snaps. 

“Seems to me like you’re acting more like a jealous girlfriend than a sister.” She stares, wide-eyed. A deer in the headlights. Her eyes are blue, almost like David’s, but not quite. “Don’t take that the wrong way, now,” Richard adds in his most kindly voice. “I just mean that he has to have his own life. His own friends.”

“Like you?” Amy scoffs. “A man old enough to be his father?” She holds up a hand, preempting him. “And I swear to God, if you say something about David being _mature for his age_ —”

“I don’t know where you get these ideas,” Richard says. He smiles, gives her just a sliver of white teeth and not the full tombstone grin. “Things like that don’t happen in a town like this.” They do, of course. They happen everywhere. In some other version of things, they probably do happen to David, because someone with different goals in mind will have seen David’s vulnerability. But in the here and now, what’s important is that Amy wants to believe him. She wants to believe that no one in their little middle-class enclave has skeletons in their closet (or, as is the case of one man right down the street, under the concrete floor in his basement). 

Amy stops coming home on the weekends. She still calls at least twice a week, but David is feeling abandoned. Betrayed. He clings hard to Richard, and when Richard suggests that David might want to leave his current family situation, David is much too ready to agree. 

He takes the boy through a door into Tull and leaves him there. David announces his arrival quite spectacularly. He shatters what precious glass is left for miles around in his panic at the strangeness, the abandonment. It’s a lot less work than bringing a revenant back from the dead, but the people of Tull find it nearly as alarming. The man in black slips back into the mantle of Walter o’Dim and starts his pilgrimage across the desert. No sense letting Roland catch up to him just because he’s curious, and there are always other ways of finding out.

Not enough changes. 

Roland blows into town as the good people of Tull are getting ready to hang David for witchcraft and/or destruction of property, depending on who you ask. It’s not what Walter would have expected to happen, but seeing a teenager about to be killed by an angry mob has a pretty predictable effect on Roland. There’s still a massacre in Tull, if on a slightly smaller scale. (The only casualties were the people bored or bloodthirsty enough to stand around the gallows.) Roland kills David, too. The damn parasite makes itself known in the middle of the fray and tries to protect its host, but neither David nor his little King are quite in control of his power yet. Roland is a man at the height of his power. His eye and heart are steady. The kid doesn’t stand a chance.

What’s left of Tull clusters around its own little cult after that, the House of Signs and Wonders, in which David is either a martyred saint or a man possessed by the devil, depending on who’s giving the sermon. Unfortunately, Sylvia Pittston had been at the gallows. She’d have made a good cult leader otherwise. Something to think about on another turn of the wheel.

On to attempt number two: early intervention. This one is extremely short-lived.

What the man in black remembers from one go-around to the next is inconsistent, but he suddenly remembers a lot about Mordred Deschain, twice-fathered and twice-mothered and a good reason he should have known better than to try to care for an infant. David, for all that he’s not a part-time spider, is still a full-time pain in the ass. He cries and shits and doesn’t do much else. 

David won’t even nurse when Flagg (wearing his favorite name) finds him a wet-nurse. David wails and refuses to suckle at the teat, still leaking milk for all that the woman herself has breathed her last. It occurs to him only much later that David could certainly tell living from dead with his gifts. He makes do with what he can conjure or pull from distant places. David, picky little bastard, even makes a face when presented with a lukewarm bottle of formula from a place much like where he was born. 

“Afraid of enchanted milk?” Flagg says, and laughs at his own joke. A perennial favorite, like the current name. David squirms and fusses. Where he’d first been grateful for the less-specific mental communication, as compared to Mordred, Flagg starts to resent it. David doesn’t think in words yet. Only sensations, which he shares insistently to make his needs known. Flagg knows when David needs to be changed because he gets a momentary feeling like he’s pissed himself.

It’s annoying. More trouble than the venture is worth. Flagg smothers the boy a few days in. During the act, his head feels like it might split open. He bleeds from his nose first, then his ears and mouth. The worst of it stops when David stops breathing, but some of the bone-deep ache between his ears never leaves him. 

Third time’s the charm, then. 

No, third time is _not_ the charm, because if he waits until David’s parasite has jumped ship of its own accord, then David is forming his own ka-tet, or something like it. And they’ll tear the world apart on their own trying to get him back. At least that one’s a failure across the board. Mutually assured destruction. No one lives: not the man in black, not Roland or his questing party, not David or any of his friends and soulmates. 

He could give up, but really, what else is he going to do except experiment? Roland gets to do that—bringing along different ancestral knickknacks from the last go-around, as if any of them besides his guns make a difference. The man in black has the benefit of greater creativity. Greater context. One of these days, one of these turns, David’s going to be the ace up his sleeve instead of a stick of dynamite. So he tells himself.

The fourth time goes well, comparatively speaking. David’s a little older than on his first attempt. Old enough to remind him of Eddie Dean, spiralling down. Old enough to drink, if only barely, and old enough to get kicked out of college. Old _enough_. 

He goes back to calling himself Randall Flagg and wears a face for David that he often wears for Roland. Creeping toward middle age, hard-edged and weather-beaten and compellingly handsome. Something a little vulpine about the eyes or the turn of the mouth, maybe; something a little reptilian about the angles of his face. Dangerous-handsome. 

He’s wondered before if David’s what they’d call slant or sly in the Northern Baronies; what they’d call queer or other, even choicer words in America. It’s still hard to tell. David wants money because he needs drugs, and he wants sex because he needs affection. He’ll take both wherever he can get them. In the bar, he flinches hard when Flagg lays a hand on his knee, but his gaze is steady as a razor in the barber’s hand. 

_Do you want to?_

“I’m not sure,” David says. He glances at another man down the bar, a little heavier-set. 

“He your boyfriend?” Flagg sneers a little, lip curling. “Your dealer? Your keeper?” Inside his head, but loud, meant for David to hear again: _Your pimp?_

“My friend,” David corrects, looking back at him. He half-turns away, hunching over his drink. “Are you offering to pay?”

“Depends,” he says. “What would I get for it?” David’s gaze slides away again, less a definite glance and more a retreat somewhere inward. Probably listening to that sorry son of a bitch curled around his amygdala. Flagg snaps his fingers in front of David’s face and gets another hard flinch, a half-hearted glare. “You want to discuss this somewhere else?”

The bar’s not a total dive, but David still hesitates before going to his knees in the bathroom. He looks up through shaggy bangs. Kid needs a haircut. 

“I’ve never,” David says, and then stops short, swallowing hard. Flagg laughs. 

“Come on, you can’t expect me to believe you’re a virgin,” he says. David stares balefully, shakes his head until Flagg gets a grip on his hair. It seems to suit David just fine. He doesn’t want someone to be nice to him.

“Of course not,” David says, sharply lucid again. “But I haven’t done it for money.” He’s thinking about his girlfriend, projecting loud. They’re on the outs now. He hopes that she might come back—dreads that she might come back. 

“Double if you don’t ask me to wear a condom,” Flagg says. 

“How much is double?” David says, and smiles crookedly. 

_Fifty_ , Flagg thinks, and David doesn’t even seem to notice that his lips didn’t move. He’s too busy calculating what that means in grams or ounces or however his drug of choice is sold. 

David sucks cock like an amateur, but not like he’s never done it before. And when Flagg wants it a little rough, a little mean, David chokes and he gags but he _takes_ it, even if that means he ends up retching over the bathroom sink afterward. For his trouble, he gets a crisp fifty-dollar bill featuring the name of a treasury secretary that never made it to office in this particular version of things. He gets Flagg standing close behind him when he looks up from rinsing his mouth out. 

“Want to get out of here?” Flagg says, and David nods desperately. 

Flagg doesn’t take them through a door to Mid-World right away. He spends the night lying next to David while he sleeps, whispering poison into his ear to draw out the little King living inside him. Flagg wants that variable out of the equation. It takes time, and the promise of a new host. Flagg plays the controlling lover in the meanwhile. Kicks the tearfully-returning girlfriend out, edges David’s ‘friend’ the dealer out of his life. Locks him in the apartment and makes sure he doesn’t die going through withdrawal. Makes sure he doesn’t take his antipsychotics. He’s David’s jailer during that time, not his nursemaid. 

David sends an angry crack spidering down through one whole wall of bathroom tiles and then curls up in the bathtub, fully clothed, terrified. 

“I did that,” he whimpers. 

“Sure did,” Flagg says, and lights up a cigarette. David’s parasite liked this brand. Flagg bought Amahl a whole carton of them and and sent him on his merry way just a day ago, wearing the body of a pretty girl who’d formerly been one of the nameless bums where David used to buy his drugs. 

“No, I—I—with my mind,” David says, trying to explain. 

“Uh-huh,” Flagg says. He’s got David calling him Randall now. It’s cute. “Want to see what I can do?” It’s all flash and bang, basically party tricks, but it’s enough that David thinks they’re the same. Enough that he’ll let Flagg show him the ropes, learn to control it. 

Amy’s a problem, briefly, but this time David takes care of the issue. With a little nudge in the right direction. 

“What is this?” she demands, gesturing to the apartment in general but looking at Flagg. “Where’s Philly?”

“Philly left our boy all alone in his time of need,” Flagg says. “Right, David?”

“She did,” David says. “And you know, come to think of it, I didn’t hear from _you_ when all that was going on.” He knows how to make his sister hurt.

“Your phone was disconnected,” Amy says. Her voice is small and tearful. She’s gotten weaker since the last time they met, or maybe she was never that strong this time around. Her eyes are brown, too. It’s always the little things, isn’t it?

“I paid the bills,” David says. “It wasn’t your money this time, either.” 

“Whose was it?” Amy says. “Because you wouldn’t be home at this time of day if you had a job—”

“Hell of an assumption,” Flagg cuts in. Vegas was a long time ago, but the drawl still creeps in sometimes. “Not everybody works in an office.” 

Amy glares. “What exactly do you do?”

“I’m the magic man,” Flagg says, and laughs. David laughs with him. “I think it’s time for your sister to go. You want to do the honors?” 

David pushes all her questions and anger right out of her head, and makes her think she doesn’t want to see him again for at least a few months. She leaves dazed, uncertain. Flagg fucks him on the couch, and then, finally, he opens a door between worlds. 

It goes well for a long time after that. David sticks by him through another few turns of the wheel, overseeing failure after failure in Roland’s quests. Flagg is proud, if not a little annoyed at how naturally David takes to it. But, then, David’s an invasive species: Roland has no natural defenses against him. And what defenses could there be, against a man who can bring down a mountain on a whim? Who can sink a city deep into the earth, or trap all its inhabitants in their minds while they slowly starve and then waste away to bone.

In retrospect, it was bound to crash and burn. They were like Maerlyn and Nimue, which hadn’t ended well for anyone, either. Animal cunning and human meanness and sheer determination can only hold sway over raw power for so long. David just traded one addiction for another: drugs for destruction. Grasping at some kind of control and failing to keep it for very long. The man in black swears off David Haller after he almost brings down the Tower. A world-breaker indeed, and very nearly a worlds-breaker. 

Four tries was enough to shuffle David deep into the deck, though. He keeps turning up. The first time, it’s in Jake’s place: a different quiet, serious boy accompanying Roland to the inevitable palaver among the bones. And, being alien to his role, he refuses to fall. That does make things more difficult. But the fact of David’s survival brings its own attendant difficulties for Roland, too. The fact that the boy almost kills Eddie Dean on that long gray beach is particularly gratifying. He does kill Mordred Deschain, which is some kind of poetic symmetry in light of the man in black’s attempt at wrangling David as an infant. The man in black, plain Walter Padick in the shadow of the Tower, gets the chance to bear witness when David begs Susannah to put a bullet in his head. 

“Please,” he says. Kneeling in the dirt beside a spray of perfect, awful roses, with his head down. “I don’t want to turn into something worse.” It’s down to the two of them. The parasite is doing its very best to get David to kill her. She obliges him. It’s an interesting variation, at least. 

Then, perhaps more predictably, David’s the addict that Roland pulls back through the first door. He’s more scared than angry, but fear has always been an excellent motivator for David. He pulls apart a few of the mumbling beasts in the surf with his mind, without meaning to, and Roland distrusts him. The man in black has given him plenty of reason to distrust magicians. Delightful, really, to see that turned to tangible use. Susannah resolves things by first being more of a problem than David and forcing cooperation between them, and then—with some of her own more pressing mental issues resolved—finds a kindred spirit in David. Not a lover, like Eddie, but a different kind of soul-deep connection. At the green glass palace, the man in black grins down at them.

“Does she remind you of Amy?” he says. “Pretty sad that you’re always looking for a girl to support you but not screw you.” David shudders. His shiny red shoes are Oxfords, like he wore to his high school graduation. The floor under them splinters.

“I don’t know you,” he says. “You don’t know me, how—I—” 

“I know you,” Roland says gravely. “Marten Broadcloak.” The man in black waves his hand dismissively. This part of the confrontation is almost always the same. 

“You sure we haven’t met?” he says, looking only at David. “Think hard.”

David remembers just enough to panic. Susannah has figured out that there’s someone or something else in his head, but she hasn’t gotten as far as figuring out what to do about it. David brings the place down on them all. Death by impalement isn’t especially fun, but at least it’s quick.

It keeps on like that. Not every time around, but enough that the man in black stops feeling wrong-footed when David’s along for the ride. Once, rather memorably, David even stands in for Susannah, though he’s ill-suited to the role and that merry band dies badly in Lud. The parasite is always a complicating factor. Sometimes it spells disaster, but other times it’s successfully exorcised through a judicious use of doors or aligning with the path of the Beam or something very stupid like the power of love.

He should have seen it coming. Even the gifted girl, his one-time experiment, shows up from time to time—usually in outlying left-handed turns of the wheel where it isn’t even Roland pursuing him. One of these days, Carrie White and David Haller will both turn up in Susan Delgado’s travelling party, and then he’ll really be in trouble. 

There’s nothing to regret, though. Not really. Better to die interested a thousand times than live bored forever.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the song "[Magic Man](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZTo3iJng7U)" by Heart, because I have no self-control. 
> 
> Content warnings: oblique discussion of child sexual abuse, canonical psychic parasitism, infanticide, dubiously consensual sex, mentions of drug addiction, sex work, a lot of manipulation and character death. 
> 
> The mention of Carrie White ending up in Susan Delgado's ka-tet is a reference to "[And Her Hair In Golden Fire](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12707445)," which I highly recommend.


End file.
